Professor Nathan Tarcov's scholarly interests include history of political theory, education and family in political theory, and principles of U.S. foreign policy. He has published Locke's Education for Liberty, Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy, and The Legacy of Rousseau, and numerous articles on Machiavelli, Locke, the American founders, Leo Strauss, and such topics as constitutionalism, democracy and tyranny. He is one of the coordinators of the Political Theory Workshop and Director of The Leo Strauss Center.

Tarcov has been recognized for excellence in undergraduate teaching, receiving the University's Quantrell Award in 1997.

Paul Staniland is Professor of Political Science. He is also a nonresident scholar in the South Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Staniland’s research focuses on political violence and international security, with a regional focus on South and Southeast Asia. His first book, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse, was published by Cornell University Press in 2014. His second book, Ordering Violence: Explaining Armed Group-State Relations from Conflict to Cooperation, was published by Cornell in 2021. 

Patricia Posey is an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago as well as the Political Science Department’s junior faculty member for the Race and Capitalism Project, where she specializes in race and American political economy.

Her current book project examines the effects of different banking and loan institutions on political attitudes and political participation. She is particularly interested in the effects of check cashing institutions, payday loan companies, pawn shops, and the like (collectively known as the fringe economy) on the atittudes of poor, black, and brown communities toward the state. The manuscript is based on her award winning dissertation project which was awarded the Urban Politics Section’s Byran Jackson Dissertation Research on Minority Politics Award and supported by the Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellowship, the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences’ Teece Fellowship, and the Department of Political Science.

Dr. Posey’s research broadly examines the relationship between American political economy and race, with a focus on the links among capitalism, urban space, technology, and political behavior. She has a book chapter with Daniel Gillion on the effects of minority protest on government responsiveness that is forthcoming with Cambridge University Press. Additionally, she has published with The Washington Post Monkey Cage and the Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics - Politics of Color. More about her research is available here.

Prior to joining the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, Patricia Posey was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as a Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in Digital Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, where she specialized in American Politics. She has been recognized as a Fontaine Fellow, Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow,  American Political Science Association Ralph Bunche Scholar, and American Political Science Association Minority Fellow.

Patricia Posey recieved her PhD in Political Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2019 and a double BA in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Florida in 2013.

John Padgett is a Professor specializing in American politics, organizational theory, mathematical models, and public policy. He is best known for his models of the federal budget process, although he has written on a variety of topics. The American Journal of Sociology published both his 1993 article "Robust Action and the Rise of the Medici, 1400-1434" and his 1985 essay "The Emergent Organization of Plea Bargaining." He is a Director of the Organizations and State-Building Workshop.

Recently, Prof. John Padgett has been awarded a grant, entitled "Modelling Organizational Innovation in Renaissance Florence," for $600,000 over three years from the Human and Social Dynamics program of the National Science Foundation. The intellectual goals of the project are empirically to study and analytically to model the micro-historical process of organizational innovation in Renaissance Florence. The official grant abstract is available here, and the full grant proposal submitted to the NSF is available here. The grant is administered through the Santa Fe Institute.

Eric Oliver is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. His interests include contemporary American politics, suburban and racial politics, political psychology, and the politics of science. His books include Democracy in Suburbia (Princeton University Press, 2001), Fat Politics: the Real Story Behind America's Obesity Epidemic (Oxford University Press 2005), The Paradoxes of Integration: Race, Neighborhood, and Civic Life in Multi-ethnic America (University of Chicago Press, 2010), and Local Elections and the Politics of Small Scale Democracy (Princeton University Press 2012). He has also authored numerous articles in journals such as the American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, International Journal of Epidemiology, Public Opinion Quarterly, and Urban Affairs Review on topics ranging from absentee voting to happiness in suburbs. He has been a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale University (1999-2001), a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation (2002-2003), and winner of a Young Investigators Career Award from the National Science Foundation. Eric is currently working on papers about public support for conspiracy theories, whether liberals and conservatives name their children differently, and conducting research on the biological foundations of political cognition.

John Mark Hansen is the Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. He has also served in many university leadership roles, including as the chair of the Political Science Department (1995-98, 2017-18, 2023-24), associate provost for Research and Education (1998-2001), dean of the Division of the Social Sciences (2002-12), and senior advisor to President Robert J. Zimmer (2012-15). 

Mark’s scholarship and teaching focus on elections, public opinion, and congressional politics. Lately, he has immersed himself in the study of the social, economic, political, and cultural history of Chicago. He is the author of three books, Gaining Access: Congress and the Farm Lobby, 1919 - 1981 (1991); Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America (1993) with Steven Rosenstone; and The City in a Garden: A Historical Guide to Hyde Park and Kenwood (2019). In 2001, he was a research coordinator for the National Commission on Federal Election Reform, an independent, nonpartisan commission chaired by Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and the author of several of its reports.

Mark has received several awards for his scholarship, including the 2009 Philip E. Converse Book Award from the American Political Science Association section on elections, public opinion, and voting behavior for Mobilization, Participation and Democracy in America. In 1993-94, Mark was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He is currently a member of the Academy’s Board and its Trust and formerly a member of its Council. He was the chair or co-chair of its Committee on Studies and Publications, whose oversight included all the Academy’s commissions and studies and the journal Daedalus, from 2007 to 2022.

Michael C. Dawson is the John D. MacArthur Professor Emeritus of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. He has also taught at the University of Michigan and Harvard University. Dawson received his BA with High Honors from Berkeley in 1982 and doctorate degree from Harvard University in 1986. Professor Dawson was co-principal investigator of the 1988 National Black Election Study and was principal investigator with Ronald Brown of the 1993-1994 National Black Politics Study.

His research interests have included the development of quantitative models of African American political behavior, identity, and public opinion, the political effects of urban poverty, and African American political ideology. This work also includes delineating the differences in African American public opinion from those of white Americans. More recently he has combined his quantitative work with work in political theory.

His previous two books, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton 1994) and Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago 2001), won multiple awards, including Black Visions winning the prestigious Ralph Bunche Award from the American Political Science Association. Dawson has also published numerous journal articles, book chapters and opinion pieces. Dawson's strong interest in the impact of the information technology revolution on society and politics, as well as his research on race are both fueled in part from his time spent as an activist while studying and working in Silicon Valley for several years. Dawson is currently finishing an edited volume, Fragmented Rainbow, on race and civil society in the United States as well as a solo volume, Black Politics in the Early 21st Century.

He is with Lawrence Bobo, the founding co-editor of the journal The Du Bois Review (Cambridge University Press), as well as being the founding director of the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago. Dawson has also served as the Chair of the Political Science Department of the University of Chicago. Among other duties Dawson was elected to the Board of the Social Science Research Council and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006. Dawson has been interviewed extensively by the print and broadcast media including the Washington Post, The Economist Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, NPR, CNN, BET, and ABC News. Dawson is also a regular commentator at TheRoot.com.